Today I visited the museum at Passchendaele, which was the location for one of the last major battles of WW1 when the allies forced back the German Army – but at a very high cost to both sides. The allies lost around 275,000 soldiers, and the Germans lost around 220,000 soldiers, and it was around a month after the battle and this German push-back that the Germans decided to surrender.
The Passchendaele Museum is inside a large traditional house. You initially think its quite small and won’t take long, but besides having displays upstairs, there is also a large extension underground which leads you to an annex where there is a mock-up of a series of British dug-outs. Outside there is a further annex with a series of trenches, both British and German. All the displays are very good, and you have an audio guide which tells you about each area, either uniforms, weapons or life in the trenches. It really is an excellent museum, thoughtful and well-resented museum and I enjoyed it very much, and well worth the 14eu cover charge.
After this I visited three cemeteries. I started at the largest one first, just outside Passchendaele at Tyne Cot. This cemetery contains around 12,000 commonwealth graves, of which many are from the final battle at Passchendaele and around 8,300 these soldiers are unidentified. At the back of the cemetery are large walls with the names of around 35,000 commonwealth servicemen who died between 1917 and 1918 and who have no grave at all. I started at one end and walked along and the names just go on and on. The loss of life was truly staggering and I found it hard to contemplate such high numbers of fallen soldiers.
After that I went to the Passchendaele Memorial just outside the town, which again contains many commonwealth graves. And after that I went to a smaller cemetery about four miles away, the London Rifle Brigade Cemetery at Comines-Warneton and then to Bedford House Cemetery. On this site stood Chateau Rosendal, a country house in a small wooded park with moats, but during WW1 the British took it over and used it as a HQ and also a hospital, and from 1915 they started to a cemetery, which grew to just over 5000 graves.
What strikes me the most is how immaculate and well-cared for the cemeteries are. Truly sobering, especially when walking along the graves and you see the ages of the men who died. Men in their late teens and twenties. A whole generation lost.
